Strat-O-Matic's new card set brings the Negro leagues back to life

In this Strat-O-Matic recreation of a Negro league game, Cool Papa Bell shows why he's considered one of the greatest players in any league. National Baseball Hall of Fame

Top of first inning: Slim Jones pitching. Cool Papa Bell grounds out to short. Pop Lloyd flies out to left. Buck Leonard hits a deep fly ball to right field. No runs, no hits, no errors. Pozmen 0, Skyliners 0.

Bottom of first inning: Hilton Smith pitching. Bullet Joe Rogan strikes out. Willie Wells singles. Oscar Charleston singles, Wells to second. Josh Gibson strikes out. Jud Wilson singles, scoring Wells. Cristobal Toriente flies to center. One run, three hits, no errors. Skyliners 1, Pozmen 0.

* * *

I have never forgotten that Olan Taylor, a good-fielding first baseman in the Negro leagues in the 1930s and '40s, was called Satan for a while. The accepted reason was because Taylor "could play like the devil" or could "knock the devil out of the ball" or some such innocent thing that probably had nothing to do with it. I remember this, though, because Taylor's mother was deeply religious and refused to watch her son play ball as long as they called him Satan. And so, for the rest of his life, they called him Jelly Taylor.

I remember that story because my friend Buck O'Neil told it to me somewhere along the way. Buck died more than three years ago now, and I'll bet that I have never gone more than two or three days without thinking about some advice he gave me or meeting someone whose life was affected by him or remembering something about the way he talked. Mostly, though, I remember the stories.

There's Oliver Marcelle, the brilliant fielding third baseman everyone called the Ghost, who was apparently so mean that he once hit the great Oscar Charleston in the head with a bat. Buck never believed that though. He said that Charleston himself was so mean that if anyone ever hit him with a bat, they would not live to tell about it.

There's the great Willard Brown, whom some teammates would call "Sonny" because, they said, that Willard would only play hard on sunny days. Sonny Brown was the first African American to hit a home run in the American League -- he borrowed a bat from teammate St. Louis Browns teammate Jeff Heath and hit an inside-the-park homer off Hal Newhouser. When Brown returned to the Kansas City Monarchs -- he only played 21 games in the big leagues -- he apparently told Buck that after the home run, Heath broke the bat.

There's Satchel Paige, and that sparks the Nancy story, of course. I cannot tell you how many times I heard the Nancy story. Fifty? A hundred? Buck could go 20 minutes on the Nancy story. I've come up with a shortened version: Buck and Satchel Paige were sitting in a hotel in Chicago when a taxi pulled up and out stepped Nancy ("Pretty as a picture"), whom Satchel had invited to Chicago. After they went up to the room, another taxi pulled up, and this time it was Lahoma -- Satchel's fiancee. Buck, thinking quickly, went out to meet Lahoma, told her Satchel was off with some reporters, and then had the bellman straighten things out upstairs. Satchel slipped out the fire escape and then walked through the front door to meet Lahoma... like nothing had happened.*

*Tiger Woods could have used a bit of Satchel's style.

That night, Buck sat awake and waited to see how Satchel would handle the situation. Around midnight, he heard Satchel's door open, and Buck (being the snooping kind) tiptoed to the door to listen. He heard Satchel knock on the door and whisper "Nancy." No answer. Satchel knocked a little louder. "Nancy!" No answer. Satchel knocked loud. "NANCY!" And then a door opened -- but it was from Satchel's room. That had to be Lahoma.

And with that, Buck opened his door and said, "Did you want something Satchel?"

And Satchel Paige saw Lahoma and said, "Yes Nancy, what time is the game tomorrow?"

And for the rest of his life, Satchel Paige called Buck "Nancy."

* * *

Top of fourth inning: Slim Jones pitching. Cool Papa Bell doubles. Pop Lloyd strikes out. Buck Leonard sees a fastball -- nobody hits the fastball better -- and hits a long home run to right field, Bell scores. Slim Jones kicks the mound. Turkey Stearnes grounds out to shortstop. Willard Brown hits a deep fly ball to left. Two runs, two hits, no errors. Pozmen 2, Skyliners 1.

* * *

I am thinking about these stories now because I am looking through an amazing set of cards. This is the new Strat-O-Matic Negro League All-Stars baseball set. This is the culmination of a lifetime of dreaming by Strat-O-Matic founder Hal Richman, and many years of hard work by a limousine dispatcher named Scott Simkus. More on them in a bit.

Strat-O-Matic, you no doubt know, is a baseball strategy game. The slogan on the box is "Manage Major League Players who hit, pitch, field and run as they do in real life." The slogan isn't necessarily catchy -- I think of the Geico commercial where the executive comes up with his own dynamite slogans like "They're the bee's knees!" -- but it's appropriate because what has made Strat-O-Matic so important and affecting to generations of baseball fans like me (and so inscrutable to others) is exactly what the box promises. You get to manage real-life baseball players. The cards can come to life. The dice can sound like the crack of the bat.

"Gary Geiger!" Bob Costas shouted out when I just mentioned the word "Strat-O-Matic." Geiger was a fairly talented outfielder in the 1960s -- a little power, a little speed -- who apparently wore false teeth when he was 22 years old. And in 1967 -- the year after Geiger hit four home runs for Atlanta -- a 15-year-old Bob Costas pulled out the Geiger card in desperation. The bases were loaded. There were two outs. He needed a home run to win the game against his cousin, John Miller. And Gary Geiger hit that home run.

"John Miller is a respected oncologist in Washington, D.C.," Costas said some 35 years later. "But if you walked up to him today and said the name 'Gary Geiger,' a look of pure horror would come over him."

When I first wrote that story, I heard from a relative of Gary Geiger, who expressed extreme joy about it. As he should. Because the genius of Strat-O-Matic comes from what we all know: Baseball is a game of numbers. Yes, that means players' skills can be expressed in numbers. But maybe it also means that numbers can be expressed in players. If 61 is Maris and 714 is the Babe and 755 is Aaron and 42 is Jackie and 56 is DiMaggio and 5,714 is Nolan and 511 is Cy... then baseball numbers can have a life of their own. Not everyone believes that. But enough of us do to make Strat-O-Matic a successful game for almost 50 years.

But it has to be real. That's the hard part. The numbers on the card have to lift off the cardboard. And that is why this Negro League Baseball set was so hard to do. Because there has always been something very unreal about Negro Leagues Baseball.

* * *

Bottom of the fourth inning: Hilton Smith pitching. Jud Wilson hits a line drive single up the middle. Cristobal Toriente gets jammed and pops up to first, where Buck Leonard makes the play. Sammy Hughes hits a ground ball to third, and Ray Dandridge makes a nice play and gets the runner at second, but Hughes beats the throw to first. Ghost Marcelle hits a long fly ball, deep to left field, Willard Brown goes way back, goes to the wall, leaps... and makes the catch. No runs. One hit. No errors. Pozmen 2, Skyliners 1.

* * *

I have always been drawn to stories about Cool Papa Bell. And I have always been repelled by them, too. You know the stories I'm talking about, right? Cool Papa Bell was so fast that he once hit a line drive up the middle and was hit by the ball as he slid into second base. Cool Papa Bell was so fast that he once scored from first on a bunt. Cool Papa Bell was so fast that he would steal second and third on the same pitch. Cool Papa Bell was so fast that managers would play six infielders and let Cool Papa handle the outfield. Cool Papa Bell -- here's the famous one -- was so fast that he could turn out the light and be in bed before the room got dark.

There's something charming about these lines, of course. But there's something phony about them, too. Cool Papa Bell was a real man, flesh and blood, who played in various Negro leagues from the early 1920s to the mid-1940s. He was, by surviving accounts, a breathtakingly fast player who could chase down fly balls all over the park and beat out routine ground balls to shortstop. He hit .300 just about every year, often hit .330, sometimes hit .350. But he did not hit .900, and he did not steal two bases on single pitches with regularity, and in fact most of the sketchy numbers that have been gathered show disappointingly low stolen base totals for Cool Papa throughout his career. The Shades of Glory numbers -- the data gathered by the Baseball Hall of Fame Negro Leagues study -- show Cool Papa with only 144 stolen bases in 865 recorded games.